Andrew Wharton

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My work explores the shifting membrane between the organic and the synthetic. Through sculpture, systems, and environments, I examine how technological and biological logics blur, intertwine, and mutually shape one another. I work with digital fabrication, machine learning, and ecological or alchemical materials to build speculative systems that feel suspended between ritual and utility, living and constructed. Philosophically, my practice is rooted in a post-natural sensibility. I’m drawn to the mythologies we build around technology, especially myths of artificial life, machinic consciousness, and post-human futures. I reference figures like the golem, the homunculus, and the monster as recurring projections of our desire to transcend our limits and remake life in our own image. My sculptures often incorporate kinetic elements, organic decay, or closed-loop systems. I aim for ambiguous forms that suggest they may be tools, vessels, prosthetics, or offerings. By layering speculative narratives with tactile materiality, I invite viewers to consider technology not just as a force of extraction, but as something that can be weird, intimate, and ecological. I approach the studio as a kind of laboratory: a space to prototype ecologies, mythologies, and machines. In doing so, I hope to offer strange systems, artifacts from a future that’s already here where the boundaries between creator and creation, symbol and structure, begin to break down.

Artwork